Provide emojiless builds, explain how to setup emoji

[fluix-dev]

I notice that the 👀 (eyes U+1F440) icon seems to render, as seen below, but it doesn't show up on the charmap.

[slavfox]

Cozette does not contain that glyph. You have Bitstream or something on your system, and fontconfig is falling back to that.

[fluix-dev]

Oh interesting, never knew such a fallback existed. In that case I don't really mind if it gets implemented. I use Cozette for weechat (to then connect to Slack), so there's tons of emoji glyphs that could be supported (the same ones as for your regular messengers like Discord, etc.) but I realize that it would be a lot of work, although I'd be willing to help.

[slavfox]

Cozette is almost certainly never going to have "actual" emoji support - it's just way too massive for me to implement reasonably, as the solo dev working on the font. Cozette has, in total, 1643 glyphs, all drawn manually. There are currently about 1800ish emoji. Even ignoring the fact that implementing emoji would be more work than all of Cozette as of right now, half of them would be completely impossible to do in a 1-bit, 6x13px 11x13px format - consider eg. the flags ( 🇪🇹, or even 🏳️‍🌈 - how do you represent that when you only have one color? ), buttons (㊙️, 🔣), and some of the more visually busy ones.

Having said that, I've selectively added a couple emoji here and there in the past - usually because a CLI tool decided to use them in its output (starship comes to mind). The best I can offer - and, having thought about this a bit, that's probably what I will do - is an alternative build of Cozette that specifically omits all the emoji, so that you can setup fontconfig to fall back to a better, full color font for them. Crispy, bitmapped Cozette text, and fullcolor vector emoji!

I've only added glyphs if there's an existing CLI tool that uses them in the past, and I'm particularly wary of adding emoji, partly because having some emoji be fullcolor and vector, and some be a bitmap, monochrome glyph, is arguably worse - or at least, uglier - than not having bitmap emoji at all.

So, after a bit of thought, I'm going to change this issue to involve providing emoji-less builds of Cozette, and adding a section to the README on how to set up your environment for pretty emoji with Cozette handling everything else.

[fluix-dev]

Cozette is almost certainly never going to have "actual" emoji support - it's just way too massive for me to implement reasonably, as the solo dev working on the font.

Oh completely, thanks so much for all you've done already!

So, after a bit of thought, I'm going to change this issue to involve providing emoji-less builds of Cozette, and adding a section to the README on how to set up your environment for pretty emoji with Cozette handling everything else.

Ah, sounds really cool, no rush.